I posted this image yesterday on Facebook and Twitpic posing the question, is it just me, or does Steve Ballmer look more and more like the Monster in Young Frankenstein?

Aside from the obvious separated at birth similarities, it got me thinking of the fact we might actually be seeing the walking dead -- not Ballmer himself, but Microsoft.

Microsoft is a stitched together carcass of bits and pieces of technology, and those bits and pieces are beginning to smell funny. They lost the browser war to Firefox, they lost the music player war to the iPod and iTunes, they're not doing so hot in the mobile market with the iPhone and Blackberry fighting for first, and the games market... well, I suppose the Xbox does okay, but it's no PS3 or Wii. (Should never named it "Ex" as in the ex-box...)

I think of the photo of the Monster with his finger on fire as an artistic metaphor for Ballmer discovering that Google has an operating system...

The metaphor is not entirely in-apt. Ballmer is a sell-what-you-have guy. Gates at least had a somewhat decent nose for the next thing, even when it was a bit late.

And Google was wise to wait on announcing their OS until they were already too big for Crime-o-soft to "cut off their air."

They are a company whose time has come and gone. More and more (and larger and larger) computer users are finding that instead of paying massive poundage for mediocre software, that they can get somewhat different mediocre software for approximately free.